Fang

18

LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, Iggy was working his magic in the kitchen, with real groceries that we’d bought from a real grocery store. He came out, a chef’s hat on his head, big oven mitts on his hands. “Come sit down,” he ordered. “Dinner’s ready.”

Gazzy raced to the table. “Lasagna! Excellent!”

I stood at an open window, looking out over the bloodred canyon, turned to flame by a glorious sunset. We were home. Colorado, that is, where we had lived, post-dog-crate but pre-world-saving-mission. We had a new house there, near where we had lived before. The CSM had built it as a big thank-you for our help in Antarctica and Hawaii.

I had missed these mountains, these gorges. Jeb had brought us here, about five years ago, after he’d kidnapped us to protect us from the mad scientists at the School. Now I was hoping Dr. Gunther-Hagen never found us here. That would have been a little too familiar.

A small black head nudged my leg, and I looked down to see Total smiling up at me. I dropped down to my knees and hugged the furry, Scottie-like body close. “You had a good visit with my mom?”

“Super,” he said. Yes, Total can talk – another advantage to being genetically engineered, if you’re a dog. “I helped out in her office. And Akila loved it.”

My mom is a veterinarian, when she’s not trying to solve global problems through the CSM. And Akila is Total’s… girlfriend. She’s a (non-English-speaking) malamute that we met on our first mission. They’re a match made in a carnival sideshow, but they seem happy. “Yeah? What’d you do?”

Total puffed himself up. “Counseled patients,” he said importantly. “It helps that I speak their language.”

“I bet. Let’s go – before Gazzy eats that whole lasagna. I’m starving.” Total’s small black nose twitched, and we both trotted to the kitchen, where yummy smells wafted toward us.

Fang sat down next to me at the table and quietly linked his ankle around mine. Total hopped up onto a chair between Fang and Nudge.

I dug in to the lasagna, which smelled like heaven, if heaven were hot and cheesy and layered with noodles and red sauce. And maybe it is.

I looked around at my family, the six of us, Total, and now Akila, all sharing a meal together. We were here, far from everyone else. Far from anyone who could hurt Fang. Far from Dylan and Dr. Gummy-Häagen-Dazs. I felt almost like weeping with joy.

I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does.

19

THE NIGHT WIND CAME in my open window. I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling. Somehow, being back in this just-like-the-old-days setting was giving me nasty flashbacks.

I thought about how Jeb had taught us everything he’d known and then suddenly disappeared. We’d been sure he was dead. After a couple years living on our own, the first nightmare in recent history: Erasers – a human-wolf hybrid – had come. They’d attacked us, destroyed our house, and kidnapped Angel. Now that we were back in Colorado, a sense of unease rattled me. I felt as if someone were watching me. Someone with a night telescope?

I shook my head. Must tamp down the paranoia.

As if on cue, I heard a sound from outside. Like a slight scratching. In seconds, I had rolled out of bed, crouched by the window, and quickly peered over the sill.

Nothing. The sky was clear. No one was scaling the wall; no one was rappelling down from the roof.

But there was that sound again. It was closer. My breathing sped up, and my hands curled automatically into fists. Then I saw the doorknob of my room turn very, very slowly. Crap!

My muscles coiled, tightened… A hand crept around the edge of the door, easing it open. I almost gasped. It was an Eraser’s paw. I was sure of it. Huge, hairy, tipped with long ragged claws. I still had scars on one of my legs from claws like that. I slithered toward the door, kneeling behind my desk.

A dark shaggy head poked around the edge of the door. I leaped up – then froze.

“Fang?” I whispered.

My eyes whipped down to his hand on the door. It was just a hand. No claws. I blinked several times.

“Sorry,” Fang whispered. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Trying to be quiet.”

I sat down abruptly on my bed, my heart pounding. “You okay?” Fang soundlessly shut the door and came to sit next to me. “You look like you saw a ghost.” I shook my head, speechless for a second.

“How come you’re awake?” Fang whispered, taking my hand in his own non-paw.

I shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. I feel like something’s sneaking up on us. Watching us.”

“You think Dr. G-H knows where we are?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He warned me – he said no wasn’t my final answer. I keep feeling like he’s coming after us, that he’ll keep asking me to join forces with him until he forces me to say yes.”

“Over my dead body,” Fang said, and I flinched.

“Not funny to use that phrase anymore, Fang,” I warned him, then continued. “I can’t stop thinking about Jeanne too. He’s clearly been experimenting on her. Which means he’s probably experimenting on everyone at that camp. And Chu is involved. I saw him gathering subjects in that first aid tent. It’s so totally Nazi-scary. For one thing, can you imagine an accidental outbreak of one of his ‘rare viruses’?”

“He could definitely do some damage,” Fang agreed.

“And that’s just for starters. People there are desperate, Fang – they’d agree to anything as long as there was a decent meal at the end of it. Lots of those kids are orphans. Who would miss them if something went wrong?”

“You think we should go back?” Fang asked.

“No!” I answered, a little too quickly. “I know; it’s pathetic. One day I’m Mother Teresa, and the next I’m all about me-me-me again. us, I mean.” Fang nodded. “The problem is, I don’t have the slightest idea how to help those people.” I sighed. “This guy is an evil genius. Most of the people we’ve dealt with are evil non-geniuses. I’m not sure how to handle him. He’s the kind of person who’s so brilliant, he probably could destroy the entire world.”

“So do we tell the CSM? The president? The New York Times?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I’ve been going back and forth on that all week. I can’t think about it anymore right now,” I said, suddenly feeling tired. “Hey, why’d you come in here, anyway?”

Fang’s too-long black hair fell over one eye. “Just checking on you. You’ve been getting wound tighter every day.”

“I guess I have. I just… don’t know what to do, and I feel like I don’t know enough about anything to figure out what to do.”

“It’ll come to you,” Fang said confidently. “For now, why don’t you try to get some sleep? I’ll stay till you’re out, if that’ll help.”

“That would help a lot,” I admitted.

I collapsed sideways on my bed and pulled the blanket over me. Fang sat at my side, holding my hand and rubbing my back between my wings.

20

FANG WAS RIGHT. It came to me. The next day I presented my plan to the flock.

“You want us to what?” Gazzy stared at me with horror.

“I want us to learn more,” I said. Plus, I needed a big project to focus on. “I’ve been thinking about this since Africa. We know some stuff – how to hack computers, break locks, et cetera. But I’ve realized there’s a lot we don’t know. And here we are, living peacefully in our new house, tons of time to spare, hours to fill up – so we should be putting that time to good use!”

“What do we need to learn?” asked Iggy.

“Oh, I don’t know… Like, why was Chad in such a mess? Why were the locals suspicious of Americans?” I paced up and down our living room. “And where did the Romans go, and how did they get replaced by Italians? I mean, the Greeks are still around!” I went on enthusiastically. “There’s so much to learn. It’s never bothered me till now – we always knew enough to get along. But now I’m thinking, How can we fight evil scientists without understanding science? How can we save the world if we hardly know anything about it?”

“We don’t have to know about something to save it,” Iggy argued. He had one foot on a window ledge, ready to jump out. “I mean, we know evil scientists really well, but we don’t want to save them.”

“Okay, that example doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “But, like, these CSM missions we’ve been on – we’ve relied on other people to tell us what we need to know. Mostly, we’ve been able to trust them. But what if they weren’t trustworthy? What if we knew enough to judge for ourselves? We could stay totally independent!”

Fang stroked his chin the way he did when he was thinking. Nudge was staring at me, and now she threw a couch pillow at my head. Only my lightning reflexes kept me from getting a face full of corduroy-covered foam.

“We’ve had so many chances to go to school!” she wailed. “But noooooo! You always hated school! You didn’t want us to learn stupid boring school stuff!”

“I still don’t like school,” I said. “But we can learn by ourselves. We can do field trips. Experiments. There are online courses. We have the computer.” I pointed to our super-duper contraband computer, lifted from the government some while back.

“I say no.” Iggy folded his arms and looked defiantly at a spot by my left ear.

“I say no too.” Gazzy folded his arms, imitating Iggy. Angel looked thoughtful but didn’t say anything.

“We need to do this, guys,” I said. “We’ll get bored if we just sit around all the time.”

“I’m happy to sit around all the time,” said Gazzy. “I don’t mind being bored.”

“Anyone who does not feel the need to deepen his or her font of knowledge is welcome to be on bathroom and kitchen duty for a month,” I said. “Are there any questions?” Eyes met mine with various expressions of anger, resentment, uncertainty, yada yada yada.

There were no questions.

21

DYLAN WAS STARING into my eyes. Hard. He was leaning toward me.

“Dylan, no – stop.”

His hands were on my shoulders, pulling me closer. “Max, stay,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. Or accept. But we were made to be together. You need me.”

I edged away but couldn’t disconnect from his eyes. “I already have everything – and everyone – I need,” I told him. I tried to sound sure of myself. It was clear that Dylan wasn’t fooled by anything.

“No,” Dylan murmured, almost sadly, as if he wanted to break the news to me gently. “You do need me, Max. I can help you more than anyone.”

“Yeah?” I asked, my voice a squeak. It felt impossible not to drown in the deep blue of his eyes. His strong hands slipped from my shoulders and curled around my back. I’d never felt anyone close to me like this except Fang. It was uncomfortable – but there were also shivers going down my spine.

“You need me because I… I can see things no one else can,” he confessed. “I can see people from across the world, across an ocean. I can see what’s going to happen. I can protect you.”

“You don’t know me, Dylan,” I said, steeling my voice but still totally under the control of his gaze. “I’ve never needed to be protected.”

It was as though he didn’t even hear me. He stroked his hands along the tops of my wings, smoothing the feathers softly. “I can see that you and I will be together,” he said, no hint of a smile on his unearthly good-looking face. “Forever.”

22

“NO,” I SAID, APPALLED. “No – that can’t be true. I’m not ready!”

“I don’t care if you’re ready or not.” Gazzy’s voice, irritated, crept into my consciousness. “Don’t forget this was your idea.”

My eyes blinked open fast, and I almost leaped into a sitting position. I stared at Gazzy, confused, afraid to look around and see Dylan lounging somewhere, a knowing smile on his face,

Oh, jeez. I’d fallen asleep on the couch. Good lord, my subconscious was doing another number on me. I frowned. At least I hoped it was my subconscious.

“Coming,” I groaned, getting up off the couch. We were on day three of our homeschooling program, and so far it felt like I was stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits of higher education. So today we were going to try to get out and “spread our wings,” so to speak. On a field trip.

Forty-five minutes later we were reducing altitude, getting ready to land in a park in the closest big city to our house. (I can’t reveal more about the locale for privacy reasons, you understand.)

“Why can’t we go to the NASCAR track?” Gazzy whined. “I think there’s a lot more that we could learn there.”

Fang nodded. “Gotta agree with Gazzy on that one. Physics. Geometry. Marketing, Advertising. Sociology.”

“You’re just lucky I’m not sending you guys to the zoo. You’ll take the art museum and love it.”

“I just don’t get what bird kids need to know about art,” Iggy said grumpily. Okay, so Iggy had a good reason to be complaining, what with not being able to see art and all.

“Well, I don’t either, to tell you the truth. That’s the whole point. There’s a reason that people flock to look at a bunch of useless things sitting in a building. We’re going to find out what it is.”

We landed in a grassy clearing away from the walking paths, then sauntered over to the nearby art institute. “Aren’t you afraid someone might find us here?” Nudge asked, looking warily at the school buses pulling up to the parking lot.

“I think an art museum is the last place in the world you’d look to find a bird kid.”

The reason? We’d never been to one. Didn’t seem like the place to head for survival. Now that I was actually in one, I saw that I’d been way off base.

Clean bathrooms. Cafeteria. Dozens of deserted corners, galleries, hallways, and back stairs where you could hide for hours, maybe even days. Outdoor courtyards for flying exercise. Huge mega-galleries with two-story-high ceilings that would be great for indoor flying. In an emergency, weapons would be available in the hall of medieval armor. The educational center had computers and books, and the gift shop had cool stuff for the younger kids – puzzles, games, arts and crafts…

Fang interrupted my reverie. “So what’s the plan?”

“Stay in pairs,” I directed. “Nudge and Angel, Gazzy and Iggy -”

“And Fang and Max,” Iggy finished in a mocking singsongy voice.

I ignored him. “Meet back here at the ticket desk in an hour and a half. And come with answers to these questions.” I pulled out a piece of paper I’d jotted notes on earlier in the day. “Okay. Each of you should tell us something you learned about history, about yourself, and about one or more of us.”

The flock looked at me blankly.

“We only have an hour and a half to practically discover, like, the meaning of life?” Fang asked.

“Why not? We’ve had to do harder stuff to survive,” I pointed out. “And besides – you never know. Someday we might have only a few seconds to figure out the meaning of life.”

23

FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS way more interested in NASCAR less than an hour ago, Fang sure seemed to be getting into the art museum. I mean way into.

“Were you, like, Indiana Jones or something in a former life?” I quipped as Fang dragged me through the fifth or sixth hall of ancient artifacts.

“Maybe,” Fang said in a faraway voice as he gazed at a birdlike ritual mask made by the – I squinted at the placard – Senufo tribe. We’d been through the Egyptian, Greek/Etruscan, Roman, pre-Columbian, and Native American collections, and now we were into African art.

“Aren’t you sick of broken pots and hatchets yet?” I asked him.

“What’s your hurry?” Fang turned and looked me in the eye. “Or d’you think that if you can’t save the world with it, it’s not worth your time?”

“Look, I have to find answers to my own questions or I lose leader credibility. And I haven’t found them here. I’m thinking maybe a da Vinci would be useful. He was pretty smart, from what I’ve heard.”

“Don’t think so much, Max. This is supposed to be about feeling stuff, not finding answers, right?”

Did I hear him correctly? Fang talking about feeling stuff?

Maybe there was something special about this place.

I knew Nudge and Angel had started off in the historicgarments gallery, and I figured they’d never leave a room full of eighteenth-century court dresses and Victorian ball gowns. So I was kind of surprised when we crossed paths near the Impressionist room.

“Predictable,” Fang whispered. “Pretty pastel-colored paintings of landscapes, flowers, and ballerinas.”

Those two were so completely zoned into the pictures that we tiptoed right by them. They didn’t even notice. What was it that Angel was so hypnotized by? I casually glanced at the placard to get the artist’s name. Mary Cassatt. I saw picture after picture by this painter of beautiful mothers with beautiful children. All soft, warm, comforting.

And I saw a tiny, tiny tear roll down Angel’s cheek.

Of all places to run into Gazzy and Iggy: the gallery where the canvases were big and the colors were wild, angry, free, and – well, explosive. The security person informed me it was called the “abstract expressionism” space.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked. “Thought you’d be in the armory.”

“Well, it’s the easiest place for me to describe what I’m seeing to Iggy,” Gazzy explained.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Fang said, pointing to a painting made up of random splatters and lines. “Seems like the hardest place to be describing stuff. ’Cause there are no… actual… pictures here.”

“I can detect color fields, remember?” Iggy reminded us. “And then Gazzy just makes up the rest. What he thinks the picture represents.”

“Yeah, like that one over there?” The Gasman gestured to a composition that looped and splashed around two yellow circles. “It says Untitled #5, but I call it Happy Breakfast: Take two gigundous sunny-side up eggs, stomp on the yolks, then dance around a little bit with an open bottle of ketchup in one hand and a can of motor oil in the other.” Iggy nodded like it made complete sense.

It was sweet of Gazzy to interpret, but God, did I wish Iggy could see with his own two eyes.

“Okay, everyone, time to report,” I announced.

I still didn’t have answers to my own questions, but one of the good things about being the leader is you can sometimes get away with not doing your own assignments. “Who wants to go first?”

Nudge, the eternal good sport, volunteered. “In the garment gallery we learned about corsets. ugh! Max, did you know that they could squeeze people to death?” Hmm, I should’ve restricted undergarments from the assignment. “I also learned that Angel can’t stand to look at any pictures with bad stuff in them, like devils or people or animals getting killed. Including dragons,” she went on. “And, um, about myself, I learned I like the photography the best. Imagination is great and all, but I like real people more.”

“A-plus, Nudge. Extra credit for that surprising insight on Angel.” Angel gave me a look like I was being mean. She was probably right. “Gazzy?”

“In the armory I learned the earliest gunpowder formula – coal, salt, pepper, and sulfur – and it was first written down in the year 1044.” I was pretty sure Gazzy already knew every formula for every explosive in history, but oh well. “And I decided that Iggy sees a lot less than he lets on. Also, I learned that I have a good imagination.”

“Sure you do, Gazzy, but didn’t we all know that?” I pointed out.

“If you did, you never told me,” he said poutily. Note to self: Must do better at encouraging flock.

“Fang? What say you, wise man?”

“Well, did you guys know the Rosetta Stone is, like, way more than a computer program? It’s actually this kind of awesome hieroglyphics-decoder-type rock. And about the flock, I discovered that in some parts of the world, if us bird kids had appeared hundreds of years ago, they literally would have thought we were gods. That’s pretty cool. And about me? I realized… I’d really like to travel the world. See different cultures, live in a tribe. I’m thinking Papua New Guinea or somewhere.”

“Yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. “Well, have fun with that. I think the flock’s seen enough of the globe lately.”

Fang flashed me a look of irritation. “Didn’t think I was getting graded, Max. Remind me to keep my mouth shut next time. I’ll risk the F.”

Okay, that was pretty much three strikes in a row for me. “I’m sorry, guys – I guess I’m just jealous that you all discovered this great stuff and I… didn’t.”

“Whatever, Teach,” Iggy said, a little disgusted. “In case you’re even remotely interested in hearing what I have to say, I learned something about myself.”

“Of course I want to know, Iggy,” I said hastily. “What is it?”

“I learned I want to see.”

We were all quiet.

Iggy had never said that. We totally took for granted that his superior extrasensory skills seemed to give him pretty much the same abilities and quality of life the rest of us had – if not better.

“I’m sorry, Iggy” was my best response. “I wish I could help you.”

“Max? You didn’t ask me,” Angel spoke up. Another wounded flock member.

“I was just getting to you, Ange. Did you discover anything?”

“Yeah. I found out that the African art collection here is on loan from the H. Gunther-Hagen Foundation. I didn’t know the doctor liked art, did you?”

My day was now officially ruined.

24

AFTER OUR ART INSTITUTE DIVERSION, I decided to go back to normal lesson plans to avoid the element of surprise – i.e., not knowing answers to my own questions. Control and I, after all, were likethis.

But even normal lessons turned out to be a problem. Case in point: everything mathlike besides plain math (+, −, ×, %) was a huge recipe for trouble. Nudge was reduced to tears by the natural-unnatural number conundrum, and tensions were high again.

“Look, I know this has been really hard,” I said, “but we don’t just quit because something is hard.”

Nudge frowned. “Yes, we do. We do all the time!”

Fang brushed his hand across his mouth and looked down at the table, obviously trying to hide a smile.

“Well, okay, maybe sometimes we do,” I admitted. “But I’m not backing down from this. We’re going to be educated if it kills us!” I looked at them seriously. “Because if we’re not educated, I’m dang sure that will kill us.”

“Max?” Angel turned her innocent blue eyes on me. “Here’s something to learn, but it’s funner to read.” She pulled out a book and handed it to me. Alarms went off in my head when I saw the cover: The Way to Survive, by Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen.

“Where’d you get this?” I took the book from her and started flipping through it.

“Dr. Hans gave it to me in Africa. It’s really interesting,” said Angel.

“Okay,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her. When was she hanging out with Dr. G-H in Africa? “Class dismissed.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I curled up in our deck hammock and blocked out the sound of the TV coming from inside while I read Dr. Scary’s book.

Fang came and sat in the other end of the hammock, so our feet were touching. I thought about the last time we’d managed to really be alone – not counting the night I’d thought he was an Eraser, ’cause that had sucked – and my cheeks flushed. I wished we were twenty years old. I wished we were safe and didn’t ever have to worry about people like Dr. G. I wished we could do whatever we wanted.

“Whatcha doing?”

“This is what Angel is reading. I’m wondering if the not-so-good doctor got to her in Africa.”

“Compelling read?”

“Just kind of horrible,” I said quietly. “At first it seems like he’s talking about how to save the earth, and how mankind has messed everything up, and how we should fix it. But if you keep going, he says that the only way for humankind to survive is if it radically changes – becomes more than human. He calls it skipping an evolutionary grade. Basically he wants everyone to ‘evolve,’ and he’s trying to come up with the technology to jump-start it. If he had his way, no one would be one hundred percent human anymore. Everyone would be hybrids, or have their genes tinkered with, to make them superhuman.”

“We like being more than human,” Fang pointed out. “But we’re only more than human because we’re rare,” I said. “What are we if everyone is like us, or evolved in different ways? What if we become the ones who aren’t special enough?”

“Hm,” Fang murmured. “So where does the doctor go with his plan?”

I frowned. “He asks for help. From scientists, from volunteers. From people who want to be on the cutting edge of a new world. But meanwhile he’s out there injecting people with God knows what – or maybe worse. And not every one of his experiments can be a success. Some of them have to be mistakes. Failures. What happens to those people?”

“He’s not going to want anyone to see his failures,” Fang fact, he’s going to make sure no one does. He’ll have to get rid of them.”

I nodded, feeling sick inside.

“Are you thinking we need to stop him?” Fang asked. “I’m thinking we need to start with some research.”

25

DR. SCARY HAD about 300,000 Google hits. We started wading. The high point was stumbling on a photo of him from grad school, which actually made me laugh out loud. Back in the old days, the doc had a lot of hair. And it was perfectly feathered. Wow. You think you know someone…

But it all went downhill from there.

On around page thirty of our search results, we clicked on a link that looked like gobbledygook – but when the screen cleared and refreshed, it almost made my heart stop. At the top of the page appeared the logotype for the Institute of Higher Living. The rest of the screen was blank except for three boxes for a user name and two passwords.

I hadn’t heard anything about the Institute in a long time. We’d busted into one of their facilities and released some mutants once. That’s where we picked up Total.

Fang and I exchanged glances. We knew we had to find a way to break in.

“Nudge?” I called, and she came over. Nudge had a preternatural gift for computer hacking and was the only one of us who truly knew her way around this high-octane government computer we’d nabbed a while back.

I couldn’t even process the flurry of mouse clicks, screen flashes, dialog boxes going open and shut, and letternumber series that Nudge keyed in to the machine as she tried to hack in. It took her about ten minutes to get access – a long time by her measure – and it took Fang and me twenty more minutes of exploring to find a list of lab reports that sounded like maybe, just maybe, they had the fingerprints of Dr. Hackjob-Wackjob:

Morbid Effects of Autoantibodies on Rodents

Autoimmune Toxicity in Systemic Viral Experimentation on Chimpanzees

Abnormal Cell Differentiation from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Experimentation

Cancerous Effects of Viral Reprogramming of iPSCs in Human Adults

Defective Apoptotic Processes and Cell Proliferation in iPSC Experimentation on Human Children

Most of those words I didn’t know, aside from the red flags of cancerous and abnormal – but human children was all I needed to feel like throwing up. I almost didn’t want to go further. But I drew a breath and forced myself to start reading the first document.

Fang and I stared at the screen.

“Is it just me or does this feel like it’s written in Latin?” Fang said five minutes later. We were both so freaked by the scientific mumbo jumbo that we hadn’t even clicked to the next page view.

“Latin would be easier to understand than this,” I grumbled. “But hold on – see those references in parentheses to ‘figure one’ and ‘figure two’ and ‘figure three’? It means there are pictures somewhere associated with this paper.”

“Well, you know what they say…,” Fang began.

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” I finished. “Let me just skim through the rest of this stuff real quick and see if anything catches my eye.”

I have to give myself credit for that one. Most grownups wouldn’t have even bothered to try to wade through that crap, but I managed to pick up on two key points.

First: Autoantibodies set your immune system against you and attack the body’s own organs like they’re the bad guys. Second: Abnormal cell growth, too much cell growth, badly “programmed” cell growth = party invitation to cancer. Great.

I started clicking through the pages of the PDF faster now, to get to the pictures. And then, when I did, I wondered why I’d been so eager to see them.

Our grisly tour of Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen’s Gallery of Mistakes took at least two hours.

We saw people with purple eyelids and grotesquely bulging eyes the size of baseballs, people with glands in their necks so swollen it looked as if there were an alien creature growing inside them. Others had muscles so inflamed their bodies ballooned and twisted into shapes I didn’t think possible. The skin disorders were maybe the worst for me to look at. Rashing and cracking and bleeding and virtual disintegration so wildly extreme that I had to stand up and walk away from the computer at one point.

This was only what was happening on the surface of these victims. I’d read enough to understand the bottom line: toxic disaster. Chronic pain, even agony, not to mention the psychological effects of dealing with it.

“There’s more. The regeneration stuff,” Fang said, and I nodded. It was a horror show, but I had to go deeper, and deeper still. Page after page, image after image, document after document.

I can’t even write down the details of what I saw on the screen that day. It would bring back too many nightmarish visions of festering wounds, partial and deformed limbs, and horrific tumors of all shapes and sizes.

“I just knew it,” I said in a low voice. “I knew he would stop at nothing to accelerate his research on humans.”

What we would call mistakes, Dr. G called progress.

26

IT WAS HOURS later when Iggy jolted us out of Dr. Hans’s Fun House.

“What’ve you guys been doing all this time? Online poker? You sure are… into it.”

“Playing a video game,” Fang answered, hiding the document on the computer desktop. Even though the other kids had seen a lot of freaky stuff in their lives, it was still our instinct to protect them from anything that might overload their quota of nightmares.

“You’re lying through your fangs,” Iggy accused.

Fang tried to play innocent – but “innocent Fang” is an oxymoron, so it didn’t work.

“That reminds me,” Angel called over to us from the couch. “I have a video for you, Max!”

She skipped to her bedroom and brought out a backpack that she turned upside down. Out dropped a clogged travel-size hairbrush, an iPod Shuffle, and a CD in a linty transparent sleeve.

“I found it in my bag a few days after we got back from Africa. It has your name on it, but I don’t know how it got there – I swear.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about this, but curiosity got the better of me and I popped the CD into the computer right away. I’d drill Angel later about why she “forgot” to give it to me until now.

When I clicked “play,” my not-good feeling got much, much less good.

My favorite finger-chopping foe smiled at me from the screen.

“Hello, Max,” Dr. Gunther-Hagen began. I braced myself, as Fang stood behind me with his comforting hands on my shoulders.

You ran out a bit quickly today, and I was so excited to be demonstrating my work that I never had the opportunity to give you some of the more important reasons why I know you would find it very rewarding to work with me.

As I’m certain was apparent from what you saw and learned of my limb-regeneration project, I am the world’s leading expert on stem cell research, bar none. Growing an organ in a dish and implanting it is rather an elementary process for me and my team compared to limb regeneration. In fact, I’ve been successfully implanting organs grown from subjects’ own tissue for a number of years. Were you to join forces with me, doors would open up for you and your flock.

He paused dramatically.

“For example, wouldn’t one of your boys love” – he reached to his side and slid a cloudy jar into view of the camera – “a brand-new pair of these?”

He picked up the container so the camera could focus on it.

Floating inside was a human eyeball.

27

THE NEXT MORNING I SET the kids to working on independent studies, and I did more computer research about genetic-recombination theory and stem cell science. I knew they had incredible potential to help humankind. But what became clear to me was that the doctor was experimenting way too fast on humans. All my research had done was upset me.

So now I was emerging from a long shower that was supposed to be therapeutic. I started dragging a comb through my brown hair, getting caught in snarls. Really and truly stuck. I got lost in the ritual of trying to untangle the tangles – contemplating Dr. Hans and Iggy and the possibility of new, healthy eyes for one of the people I loved most in the world – as the moisture on the mirror slowly began to dissipate.

That’s when I spotted an Eraser in the mirror, looking out at me through the fog.

Reactions were faster than thought, and I whirled, one fist raised to strike… an empty wall. A fast look showed that unless the Eraser was paper thin and stuck to my back, there was no one in here but me.

I sat on the edge of the tub, heart pounding.

This had happened once before, ages ago. I’d looked in the mirror and seen an Eraser version of Max looking back at me. But Erasers didn’t even exist anymore – they’d all been “retired.” I peeped up over the edge of the mirror. The steam had cleared, and I saw my human face, my brown eyes.

What was happening to me?

28

SWEARING UNDER MY BREATH, I searched the bathroom, opening cupboards, feeling under the sink. I examined every inch of every wall and ran my fingers around the window frame. If there was a camera hidden in there, I didn’t find it.

A tap on the door made me jump like a deer.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me.”

I unlocked the door and let Fang in. Grinning, he shut the door behind him. Then he saw my face. “What’s wrong?” He glanced around. “You have that ghost look again.”

I let out a breath. “Nothing.”

“Then why is a comb stuck in your hair?”

Crap. I slowly pulled it out, trying to get through the worst of the tangles.

From down the hall, I heard raised voices and a crash, and I tensed.

“The kids are taking a little break,” Fang said.

“But everything’s okay out there?” I tried to sound casual.

He shrugged. “I think they’re getting cabin fever.” He stepped forward and put his hands around my waist. “But enough about them,” he said, and his voice sent chills – good ones – down my spine.

I wanted to forget about everything and escape into Fang’s kiss. Don’t think, just feel.

“Where’s Max?” I heard Gazzy say out in the hall, and Iggy responded.

“Wherever Fang is, of course.” They laughed.

I pulled away from Fang. Even this was being ruined.

“They’re okay,” said Fang, bending his head again.

A second later I nearly jumped out of my skin, though. “Oh, Fang, you’re so haaandsooome,” I heard. It sounded like me – standing right next to me.

That was Gazzy, doing one of his absolutely perfect impersonations. He also had a gift for throwing his voice.

“Max! Let me take you away from all this! My darling!” If I hadn’t been holding Fang – and also hadn’t known that he would never say something that corny – I would have sworn it was him. Cackling laughter.

Fang and I leaned our foreheads against each other.

“Whoa – watch it!” There was a loud crash, and I practically pushed Fang into the wall. Yanking the door open, I strode down the hall.

“What’s going on out here?” I demanded, hands on hips.

“Nothing,” Gazzy said, smirking. “What’s going on in there?” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, and my face burned. Then I saw it: a pile of broken dishes and leftover food all over the floor.

“Who did this?”

“It was me,” Gazzy said in Nudge’s voice.

“Hey!” she said. “They were wrestling.” “You’re supposed to be studying,” I snapped.

“Oh, while you get to make kissy-face with Fang in the bathroom?” Iggy sneered. “I don’t think so.”

I was so mortified I was speechless for a second. Then I stamped my foot and said, “Get back to your books!” Which was, of course, a huge mistake.

29

THEY JUST STARED at me for a moment, then Iggy’s face contorted into anger. He yanked off his iPod earphones and threw the whole thing across the room. “I can’t take it anymore!”

“Hey!” I said sharply. “Those are expensive!”

“I can’t help it!” he shouted. “I’ve been listening to how the Roman Empire fell, and all I can say is, it didn’t fall nearly fast enough!”

“You’re, like, totally sucking the fun out of the first kind-of vacation we’ve had in ages and ages!” Gazzy whined, his arms crossed.

Even Nudge, my peacemaker, chimed in. “I listened to an hour of French history this morning, and I thought my head was going to explode,” she said. “It’s just, army this, invader that, conquering whatever. We have to learn, and I love learning things, but there has to be a better way. Like at a school!”

I was shocked – Nudge had always been my most loyal supporter.

Well, I wasn’t going to stand for this. I was the flock leader! I was going to restructure our lesson plans, I was going to start issuing demerits or other teachery things, I was going to…

I was going to stop being such a hard nose.

I had an idea, and I like to think it actually came from my own brain and not from the Voice or from Angel. And it’s so sad that I even need to clarify that.

“You know,” I said slowly, “I’m going to be fifteen tomorrow.”

Blank stares. I guess I hadn’t made the smoothest segue in the world.

“What?” Iggy asked.

“I’m going to turn fifteen tomorrow,” I said, warming to the idea. “It’s high time. I can’t remember when I turned fourteen. We’ve got to start writing this stuff down. Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to be fifteen. So we need a party.”

“If you get to be fifteen, then I get to be fifteen!” Iggy sounded indignant.

I looked at Fang. “Wanna be fifteen?”

His smile melted me. “Yeah.”

“I want to be twelve!” Nudge cried.

“I’m nine! I’m nine!” said Gazzy, jumping up and down.

“I’m already seven, but I didn’t have a party,” said Angel.

“Then it’s decided,” I said in my leaderly way. “We’re all turning a year older tomorrow, and we’re going to have a big party.”

My flock cheered and started dancing around the room. I sighed happily.

Sometimes being a good leader is knowing when to… back off.

30

“ME AND MY BIG MOUTH,” I muttered, looking around my room. “Sure, let’s have a party; let’s all get a year older! Excellent idea, Max. But what are you gonna do for presents?”

The six of us had never had much, and we’d been on the run, on the road, for so long that we’d been forcibly pared down to having, like, nothing. But I wanted to do this right -’cause what’s a birthday party without presents?

I had about twenty hours. I was going to have to improvise. Opening my bedroom window, I climbed onto the sill and looked out over the canyon. I was stopped by a sudden thought.

I knew what I really wanted to get Iggy for his birthday.

And I knew where to get it.

But… I just couldn’t pay that price. I couldn’t.

I leaned forward and let myself drop into the air, enjoying the thrill of free-falling before snapping my wings out and rising.

Let’s see the doctor touch the sky!

“Do you think she’d like a bomb of her own?” Gazzy asked Iggy.

Iggy thought. “I kind of don’t think so. She usually just relies on us to do all that.”

“Well, what can I give her?” Gazzy ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “Bombs are the only thing I know how to make!”

“Well, here’s an idea,” said Iggy, and leaned over to whisper into Gazzy’s ear.

A smile slowly widened on Gazzy’s face. He rubbed his hands together. “Brillllliant.”

Nudge sang softly to herself as she worked. It had been totally worth it, lugging everything back from Europe and New York. Look at how handy these things were now! Her backpack had been stuffed, and she’d hidden 80 percent of everything she’d bought, sure that Max would make her dump it as being not worth lugging around, a liability in case of a fight, etc., etc., etc. Now it was all paying off.

Two presents down, three to go. She smiled as she reached for the hot-glue gun.

Angel straightened, listening. Overhead she heard the cries of a hawk, and she shaded her eyes to watch it wheel through the sky. She loved flying with hawks. They’d all learned a lot from them. You’d think that flying would be as natural as walking, and it was, in a way, but it was also a skill that could be improved.

Other than the hawks, she was alone in the canyon. She had most of what she needed, but a couple more things would be perfect. Her sharp eyes darted here and there, searching in the shadows, checking out every shape, every outline.

Oh, there! Perfect! It was amazing that vultures hadn’t picked the bones clean.

It was just what she needed for the presents she was making.

Fang saw the shine of familiar brown hair way down the street and stepped back quickly into the shadow of a storefront. What was she doing here, more than a hundred miles from home? He smiled: no doubt the same thing he was doing.

So far he was in good shape: He’d gotten a really scary thriller novel on CD for Iggy. It was totally inappropriate for kids, and he knew Ig would love it. For Nudge he’d bought a dozen different fashion magazines, all about hair and clothes and makeup. He could already imagine her squealing with joy, then disappearing for several days to curl up somewhere and pore over every page.

For Gazzy? A history of explosives and how they’d been used in warfare for thousands of years. It was like giving candy to a diabetic, but it was perfect.

Angel had been a bit more difficult. Dolls or games or anything for a little kid just seemed too… young. She’d changed so much in the past year. She didn’t even sleep with Celeste anymore, the ballerina bear she’d scammed for, so long ago. And yet, she was still a little kid.

He’d finally settled on a camera. And he hoped she would use it for good instead of evil. The first time she rigged it up in the boys’ bathroom, he’d take a baseball bat to it.

And for Max – Fang smiled even as his heart began to pound a little harder. He hoped she would like what he got her. He hoped she wouldn’t say it wasn’t practical or whatever. But with Max, you never knew.

It was one of the things he loved best about her.

31

“IG, YOU HAVE outdone yourself,” I said, taking another bite of chocolate cake.

Iggy grinned and cut himself a second slice, which meant there was only about half an acre of cake left, slathered with a couple bathtubs’ worth of icing.

“You have to get the right proportion of cake to ice cream,” Gazzy said. “Each bite needs cake, frosting, and ice cream, all at once. It’s the combination that really makes it.” He managed to get his carefully loaded spoonful into his mouth before it dropped onto his shirt. Like the last one had.

“And thank you to Fang for getting the ice cream,” I said, waving in his direction. “And the balloons!”

Everyone chimed, “Thank you!” while Fang bowed.

My happy, chocolate-smeared bird kids were relaxed, laughing, having the best time we’d had in – ever. It was the perfect way to celebrate our new house, our new lives.

“Is it present time?” Nudge asked, bouncing in her seat. “I can’t wait anymore!”

“Yes,” I said, and everyone cheered. So let me see: have party, massive amounts of cake and sugar, presents, etc., and I’m super popular. Insist on schooling, homework, education, and everyone hates me. Okay, got it. “Who wants to go first?”

“Me, me!” Angel jumped up and rummaged in a paper grocery bag, pulling out small packages wrapped in the Sunday comics – one for each of us.

I quickly ripped open the paper on mine, and something small fell into my lap. I picked up a necklace strung on a black silk cord.

“It’s a good-luck charm,” said Angel. “I made it myself. I found all the stuff outside.”

My necklace was weird and beautiful, not unlike Angel herself. “Is this a… snake jaw?” I asked. Angel nodded. The small, sharp fangs of a snake’s lower jaw spiked delicately among eagle feathers, bits of worn glass, and some ancient aluminum pop-tops from soda cans.

“See?” said Angel. “It’s like you: kind of dangerous but really pretty and strong and unusual. See?”

The bits of glass caught the light and glittered like gems. I nodded, really touched. “Thank you,” I said, and gave her a big hug, like old times.

Each of us had a similar but unique necklace, and each necklace really reflected who we were. Fang’s was all black obsidian, the top half of the snake jaw, and some eagle feathers. She’d really put a lot of thought and work into them.

“Now mine!” said Nudge, pulling out her wrapped gifts.

I’d never had so many presents all at once, and even though I was a big fifteen-year-old now, I couldn’t help feeling excited as I ripped off the wrapping paper.

Nudge had hot-glued all sorts of pretty shells and beads around a picture frame. It was gorgeous, too heavy to lug around, and totally not sturdy enough to survive even a light battle.

“Nudge, it’s beautiful! I love it!” I told her. She threw her arms around me, and I realized that she had grown several inches without my noticing.

“Oh, my, gosh.” Angel’s quiet voice got my attention. I looked over to see her holding a small digital camera, her eyes wide.

“Who gave you that?” I exclaimed.

Angel’s face shone. “Fang. Oh, I love it so much! I’ve wanted a camera for so long. The first thing I want to do is take a picture of all of us.”

“I can put it in my frame,” I said, holding it up. Nudge looked pleased.

“Here,” said Iggy. “I made fudge for everyone. Didn’t have time to wrap it.” He held out a large plate covered with neat squares of marbled chocolate-peanut butter fudge. I figured we had about forty minutes before we were all in sugar-induced comas.

“Max!” Gazzy cried. “Way cool!” He held up his certificate for one tattoo at the tattoo parlor a couple towns over. (No, I’m not going to mention which one.)

“I got one too!” Nudge squealed, waving it around. “I’m going to get a unicorn! Or a heart! Or a rainbow!”

“I’m going to get a stick of dynamite on my arm,” Gazzy said.

Okay, it wasn’t the most imaginative gift, but I’d been pretty sure everyone in the flock would like a tattoo. It looked like I was right.

Fang came and stood next to me. “This is for you.”

He held out a small box tied with satin ribbon. My heart started thumping hard, as if I’d been in a fight. With shaking fingers, I pulled off the ribbon and opened the box.

32

I QUIT BREATHING for a moment when I saw what was inside the box. It was a delicate, old-fashioned birthstone ring, with this month’s birthstone.

Every other person in the world would have looked at it and thought, Max would hate this. It was girly. It was beautiful. It wasn’t made of titanium and black leather with spikes on it. But it seemed exactly right, in a weird, heartfluttery kind of way. And I really loved it.

Quickly I slipped it onto the ring finger of my right hand. It fit like it was made for me. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

I realized that Fang was waiting for a reaction. “Thanks,” I managed, my voice husky. “It’s perfect.”

“You’re perfect,” Fang whispered, leaning close. “As is.”

It took several seconds for me to realize I was beaming at him like an idiot. I shook my head, trying to escape the pull of his gaze.

“Okay, now! Everyone up to the roof!” Gazzy said, clapping his hands. “I can’t give you your presents inside! Something might catch on fire.”

I had a flash of concern that was quickly wiped out as we all flew up to our rooftop. The sun had just set, and there was a lingering pink glow outlining the mountains in the distance.

We sat down in a line on the roof, our legs dangling over the edge. Even in the dim light, I kept turning my hand this way and that, looking at my ring, feeling like I was glowing inside.

Nudge, sitting next to me, gave me another hug. “A tattoo!” she said happily. “They’re so in right now! I can’t decide.”

“You’ll find the perfect thing,” I told her, happy that she liked my gift.

“Now, everyone, stay sitting down,” Gazzy said, fiddling with something in a big cardboard box. Fang moved behind me and gently pulled my shoulders back so I was leaning against his chest. Of course I started practically hyperventilating. After the flock’s teasing, I was super selfconscious, but clearly Fang had no intention of pretending that we weren’t – together.

“Max first,” said Gazzy. “Since it was her idea to have a birthday party.”

We all cheered as Gazzy flicked his lighter. Something caught fire in the darkness, and after a few seconds of hissing and crackling, went whoosh out into the night. Three seconds later it exploded, making a gorgeous blue fireball of sparks, and we all went ooh and ahh. As the sparks fizzled and began to fall, they looked roughly like the letter M.

“Oh, my God!” I cheered. “Gazzy, that’s beautiful! How did you get it to do that?”

Gazzy smiled modestly. “I can’t tell you that. Next, Fang!”

Fang’s fireball was a brilliant orange, lighting up the sky.

In fact, it was so bright that it illuminated the old, unused logging road way below us in the gorge. And it showed a black Jeep four-wheeling it up the side of our mountain.

I got to my feet just as Fang’s orange letter F appeared. “Flock!” I announced. “We have company.”

33

WE CROUCHED DOWN, staying in the shadows on the roof. The moon was bright overhead, and our raptor vision easily picked out the dark Jeep as it came toward us.

“Any chance it’s lost? On its way somewhere else?” Fang asked softly.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Sure. It’s probably the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, and they’re looking for the North Pole.” I shook my head, already pumped into battle mode.

It was starting. I could feel something change. I’d been on edge, paranoid for days. There was too much déjà vu: the house, the location… I’d seen an Eraser paw and an Eraser face. Even the black Jeep reminded me of the first time the Erasers attacked our old house. We’d been on the run ever since.

It was almost like the nightmare of the past year was about to start all over again.

“Okay, guys,” I said tightly, “let’s fan out. Hide high in trees, watch and see what happens. Check the sky for choppers; make sure the Jeep’s sunroof doesn’t open. When I give the signal, we attack. Aim for the Jeep’s windows. Break ’em.”

“Right,” said Gazzy, his face determined.

Almost silently, we ran hunched over to the other side of the roof, farthest from the road. I couldn’t believe this was happening. We’d barely been at the house a week…

I coiled my muscles, just about to jump – but then Angel cocked her head. “Wait – hold on, Max. I think… it’s Jeb.”

“Jeb?” Nudge said in disbelief.

Angel straightened and nodded her head. “Yeah, it’s Jeb. We don’t have to attack him, do we?”

I groaned to myself. As much as Jeb now claimed he was trying to help us, help me, I could never trust him again. It was like he woke up and said, “Oh, today’s Tuesday, an evil day.” Or “Friday again – guess I’ll be a white hat.” His shifting loyalties made my head spin.

“Is he alone?” I asked.

Angel looked thoughtful for a moment. “No.”

“Great.” I sighed. “No, I guess we don’t have to attack him. But keep an eye on whoever’s with him. It’s not my mom, is it?” I asked, suddenly hopeful.

Angel shook her head. “Sorry.”

The Jeep pulled up at the base of our house’s supports, and I jumped down to the ground to meet it. (You could get into our house only by flying or climbing a long ladder that we let down. Or not. That little design feature had been my idea.)

The driver’s door opened, and Jeb got out. At one time he’d been my savior, my teacher, my confidant. Now he was mostly just someone to be wary of – and, apparently, my biological father. But his contributing a cell to a test tube didn’t make me all misty eyed and eager to forgive. He would never feel like a father to me – not anymore.

“Jeb,” I said evenly. “I guess Mom told you where we were, how to find us?” Inexplicably, my mother still trusted Jeb. And I trusted my mom. Which was the only reason Gazzy wasn’t under the Jeep right now, rigging a detonator.

“Yes,” Jeb said. “She’s getting a team together for another CSM mission – I’ll have to tell you all about it later.”

The other car door opened, and I braced myself. But instead of, say, Mr. Chu, or a killer robot, or a cyborg assassin, it was something worse: Dylan.

My “perfect other half.”

34

JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME and the lamppost, Dylan could easily be any girl’s perfect other half. If I didn’t already have a perfect other half, I might have been thrilled with the gift of my very own gorgeous mutant.

The moonlight glinted off Dylan’s dark blond hair, which dipped in a wave over one eye. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and I could see the tops of his wings, a warm chocolate brown, darker than mine or Nudge’s.

For no reason I could think of, my heart seemed to thud to a halt. Somehow I hadn’t expected to see Dylan again, no matter what the Voice said. I’d left him behind in Africa. Now here he was, at my home. Looking at me intently.

Almost as if I were prey.

One by one, the rest of the flock fluttered down from the roof to stand with me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Jeb curtly. “And how did you get hold of him? Are you best buds with Dr. Gunta-Hubunka?”

“I wanted to come see you,” Jeb said. “Wanted to make sure the house was okay, that you were settling in, that it seemed safe.” He beckoned to Dylan to come closer. “Dr. Gunther-Hagen works in the same field of science as I do. We’ve crossed paths.”

I thought about how the good doctor had said he didn’t know Jeb. Did anyone ever just tell the truth anymore?

“Hi, Jeb,” said Angel. “Hi, Dylan.”

Everyone except me said hi. Not warmly or welcomingly – we’re too naturally wary for that – but somewhat civilly. Angel actually smiled.

Having Jeb here was bad enough – a violation of our privacy. And he’d had the gall to bring Mutant-Freak 2.0. Don’t be scared of possibilities, Max, the Voice said now, just to piss me off. Don’t close any… escape routes.

Huh? Escape routes? How could Dylan be an escape route?

“Dylan, you remember the flock,” Jeb said, pointing at each of us in turn. “Angel, the Gasman, Nudge, Iggy, Fang, and Max.”

Dylan nodded. “I’m really glad to see you again,” he said, not smiling. “You’re the only ones who are… like me.” His eyes focused on me again. I looked away.

“Maybe we can come in,” said Jeb. “Get caught up.” There was no way I was letting them in our house. It wasn’t that I automatically assumed Dylan was evil. The jury was still out on that. But I just didn’t get the point of his being here.

And he bothered me. He bothered me a lot.

“Sorry, no can do,” I said, just as Fang said, “Sure, what the hey. Come on up.”

I looked at Fang. His dark eyes questioned me.

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” I agreed ungraciously. I felt as taut as a bowstring and wondered how soon I could get rid of them both.

“Dylan, you can just fly up, like the rest of us,” said Fang. “Jeb, we’ll put down the ladder for you.”

Dylan glanced up at the house’s doorway, frowning. Angel and Nudge jumped up and were through the door with a couple of wing strokes. Dylan looked at me again, then at Jeb. “Yeah, okay,” he said finally.

He set his jaw, rolled his shoulders a couple times, then gave a jump into the air and tried to flap hard. But he hadn’t given himself enough room, and he just thunked back to the earth again, his wings whapping painfully against the ground. Typical newbie.

I heard barely suppressed snickering from Gazzy and Iggy as they flew up onto the porch.

Dylan’s chiseled face flushed as he let out a controlled breath and shook his head. “Not as easy as it looks,” he said wryly. “I’ve been trying -”

“Max taught the younger kids to fly,” Jeb said. “Max, why don’t you take a minute, give Dylan some pointers?”

My jaw all but dropped open. “Oh, he’ll get it soon enough,” I said, glaring meaningfully at Jeb.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” said Dylan, acting casual. “It’ll just take practice. Max doesn’t need to waste her time on this.” I wondered if he didn’t want a girl teaching him.

Incidentally, other people not wanting me to do something has often been Step One in making sure I do something. Plus, for a minute I actually felt a little sorry for him. It’s one thing to be a three-year-old with baby wings and learning how to fly. But this guy was… almost… a man. A little pathetic.

“Well, whatever. I can take a minute,” I heard myself say.

“Yeah?” Dylan raised an eyebrow and looked at me. He seemed to be trying not to look too eager.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” I said, making a mental note to get a good look at his wings. For all I knew, they were remote-controlled and duct-taped to his back.

“Have at ’im,” Fang said easily, and he was on the front porch with an almost silent flutter of his wide deep-black wings. God, Fang’s wings were gorgeous. They looked like they belonged on the Angel of Death.

“Good – thanks, Max,” said Jeb, climbing the ladder Fang had just lowered, and I indulged in a moment’s fantasy about someone slamming the trapdoor on his head.

Then it was just me and Dylan alone out here in the canyon, in the moonlight, and I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.

“Okay,” I said, but my voice came out weird. I gave a little cough. “Let’s do this thing.”

35

FOR A COUPLE OF SECONDS Dylan and I stood there awkwardly. The night seemed darker and quieter than it had a moment ago. I could smell Dylan’s clean scent, like soap and mountain air.

“I thought flying would come naturally to me,” he said. He carefully opened his wings and frowned, as if testing their strength.

“Well, it’s like walking, or riding a bike,” I explained. “It’s sort of natural, but you also have to practice.”

I remembered Ari, Jeb’s son. He’d been a little sevenyear-old. Then someone had spliced his DNA with Eraser genes and grafted wings onto him, retrofitting them. The result had been a huge disaster, a Frankenstein.

It looked like they had finally gotten everything right with Dylan. No one could accuse him of being a Frankenstein. More like Frankenhunk.

I realized what I was thinking and immediately shooed it out of my head. “So, I, uh…,” I started babbling. “I guess you flew here… from Africa?” I asked. “Like, in a plane?”

“Yeah. What about you guys?”

“We flew flew here. Took about five days. We were pretty whipped afterward. That Atlantic Ocean is a beast.”

“That’s so amazing.” He gazed at me in open admiration. “I can’t believe how strong you are.”

The dream I’d had about Dylan popped into my head in full Technicolor. “Was it hard for you to get used to being big?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. Chitchat is obviously not my best skill. “I mean, I guess you grew pretty quickly.”

He shook his head. “I’ve always been this size. I don’t remember anything else. They… made me this way.” He hesitated for a moment. “I don’t remember being a little kid. I’ve only been alive for eight months, but it’s been long enough to realize that I’m a… freak.” He gave a sad little chuckle.

“Well, yeah,” I said, not pulling any punches. “So are we. But you’ve got to remember that you didn’t make yourself this way. We didn’t ask for this to be done to us. Other people did. They knew better, knew they were treating us like lab rats, and they did it anyway. They’re the monsters, not us.”

“Are you angry about it still?” He looked curious. It was an odd feeling to have anyone – especially a guy – ask me about my emotions.

“Well, I don’t know. Mostly I just suck up what life throws my way, stomp on it, and then keep going. I don’t dwell much on what I am or how I got this way. It just is. I just am. I’m Max, and whatever form I take, it’s good enough for me.”

He smiled. Were those whitening-strip-bright teeth I saw flash between his lips? “It’s good enough for me too.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion on it,” I snapped. Ouch. Sometimes I even surprise myself. “Sorry,” I muttered.

“Don’t be sorry. You’re right,” Dylan said smoothly. “You didn’t ask me. And it doesn’t really matter what I think, anyway. I’m definitely a beginner-level freak.”

“Well, we’ve had years – our whole lives – to get used to it and figure things out. You’ve just been thrown into the middle of it. It’s actually kind of amazing that you’re not totally freaking out.”

You can help each other, Max, said the unwelcome Voice. You’re perfect complements to each other.

“Shut up!” I hissed under my breath, and Dylan looked startled.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Gritting my teeth, I nodded. “No, I know. It’s just -” I decided to take a risk and stared him down. “I hear voices, okay? If you’re gonna be here, get used to it. Or else keep your distance.”

If I’d hoped to scare Dylan away from me, he didn’t seem disturbed much. “Sure, Max. Whatever.”

“Okay, so, flying,” I started, taking a deep breath and focusing on the thing I loved most in the world. “Flying is… great. It feels great when you’re doing it. It’s fun. Pure freedom. There’s nothing better.”

Dylan smiled, a slow, easy smile that seemed to light up his whole face.

“So the first thing we’re going to do,” I told him, “is push you off the roof.”

36

“HOW DID IT GO?” Jeb asked, when we got inside half an hour later.

“Great!” Dylan reported enthusiastically. “I did it! Max is a great teacher.” Before I had time to react, he put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed.

“He’s a natural,” I said, looking at Jeb and wiggling free of Dylan’s arm. “A quick study. Won’t need much more help from me.” I crossed the room and cut a piece of cake, feeling myself flush.

“The flock has been filling me in,” Jeb said. “And I see you all turned a year older today.”

“Yep.” I took a big bite of cake and perched on the sofa arm to eat it. Clearly Jeb had taken in the remains of the birthday party – the cake, the balloons, the decorations. Years ago, he’d organized the parties and bought the presents and got the ice cream. Well, he’d given up his right to do that. We didn’t need him anymore – not for anything. I hoped it broke his heart. “So, Jeb, why are you here?”

“I miss you guys,” Jeb lied. I knew him too well. “I wanted to get you caught up on CSM stuff. And I wanted Dylan to see you again, and vice versa. Being with the flock is exactly what Dylan needs. Already, in half an hour, you’ve taught him more about who he is, what he is, than he’s learned in eight months.”

“So how did you get a hold of him?” I asked. “I thought he belonged to Dr. Hunca-Munca. You just asked the doc to borrow him for a road trip?”

“I’m standing right here,” Dylan said, sounding irritated. “But that’s okay. Talk about me like I’m not.” He crossed his arms over his chest as Jeb looked at him in surprise.

“That’s the tricky part, Jeb,” I said snidely. “You guys are always stunned when your little creations, your science projects, turn out to have minds of their own. To want to do stuff for themselves instead of falling into line with whatever you have planned for them.” I pointed to Dylan. “He’s an actual person. He’s alive. He’s not just a bunch of genes that happen to function! When are you gonna learn? When are you going to quit playing God?”

“I didn’t create Dylan!” Jeb protested.

“But you brought him here so our skills could rub off on him, right? What about our skills of disobedience? Independence? Our inability to live in cages?” My voice had been rising, and now I realized that everyone else had gone silent. “What if all that rubs off on him?”

Jeb rose to his feet. “I got you out of those cages!” he snapped.

“You’re also the one who put us in those cages in the first place!” I was fuming. “You always seem to forget that part!”

“And you always forget that I saved your lives!” Jeb yelled. I’d never seen him so angry – none of us had. “Not just once, but over and over! If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead by now! If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be alive in the first place!”

The others were staring in shock. Looked like I’d blown our little party to all get-out.

“Which one of us regrets that more, I wonder?” I said, and then I ran to the front door and jumped.

37

I SNAPPED OUT my wings before I hit the ground, and soared up into the rapidly cooling night air. My head was spinning, and it wasn’t only because of the four pieces of cake I’d had. Though right now I was regretting them.

I needed answers. I needed someone to say, “This is how it is, without a doubt.” Only problem was, who would I trust to tell me that?

You can trust me, Max.

I groaned and rolled my eyes. Perfect. The Voice chiming in now was the perfect thing to push me right over the edge.

Max, if you get pushed over the edge… you’ll just fly, right?

I hated it when the Voice said things like that, turned my own words around on me.

Yeah, sure. If one can snarl a thought, and I believe one can, I snarled that one. But listen, Voice, now that I have your attention – got a question for you: Why is Jeb really here? Why did he bring Dylan?

The Voice was silent. My mind filled the silence with:

Could Jeb possibly be here to carry out Angel’s prediction? To kill Fang?

He’d brought us into this world. I knew he was capable of taking us out of it.

And – had he brought Dylan to replace Fang?

If Dylan was here so Fang could be eliminated, then World War III was about to break out.

I clutched the snake necklace Angel had made for me. Fang wore the matching one around his neck. He was my perfect other half.

I know you love Fang, the Voice said now, not answering my questions. Fang’s an amazing guy. But you two have too much history together. Dylan has… potential. Great potential.

No way! I almost shouted out loud. I swear I’m gonna kick their butts out of here!

Jeb has his own reasons for being here, said the Voice. But I want you to think about Dylan, the possibilities there. He could help you.

Yeah? Like how? I yelled inside my head.

He has incredible Sight. He doesn’t realize it yet. But he can see things happening far away, can see people across oceans – maybe even across time.

I was so shocked I stopped flapping; only the wind yanking my wing muscles up tight made me snap out of it. That was exactly what my dream had been about – Dylan saying that to me.

Max – if you and Fang are together, there’s only one flock. But if you and Dylan are together, and Fang is leading a different flock… you’re all twice as likely to survive in the event of an apocalypse.

My fevered brain tried to process this. And who would Fang be with? What other flock? Are there more like Dylan?

Again the Voice didn’t answer me directly. Big surprise. You and Fang are both too independent. You both tend to solve problems with force, violence. Dylan has different instincts. Which broadens your possibility for survival?

The Voice was hitting me below the belt, in that it was using reason and patience on me. Totally unfair tactics. I lashed back. This is too weird and stupid, even for you, I thought scathingly.

Max – confront your fears said the Voice. Then it went silent.

38

I WAS STILL about a half mile from home when I smelled smoke. I sped up, and my heart seized as I saw the toofamiliar bright flickering of flames coming from inside the house. I swooped inside and skidded to a halt in the foyer.

Our couch was in flames.

Jeb hurried in from the kitchen, Angel right behind him. He had a big mixing bowl of water, and Angel had a juice pitcher. They threw the water onto the couch, where it barely made a dent in the blaze.

“What’s going on here?” I shouted as loud as I could to be heard over the din of bird kids yelping at one another. I lunged into the kitchen and grabbed a red cylinder out of the corner. “Any of you ever hear of a fire extinguisher?” I screeched as I put out the blaze.

Everyone turned and started yelling at me, God only knows why. I covered my ears. “Where’s Fang?”

Nudge put her hands on her hips, tears in her eyes. “Isn’t he with you?” she asked. “He’s always with you.”

Just then, to complete my perfect evening, the automatic sprinkler system finally detected the blaze and went off, spraying us all, soaking everything with cold water. I stood there, my hair getting plastered down. The couch sputtered and fizzled and filled the air with the scent of Eau de Wet ‘n’ Charred upholstery.

I gave Gazzy my best “You’re in so much trouble” glare and went out onto the back deck to look for Fang.

On the deck, I jumped to the railing and balanced there, planning my search pattern. It wasn’t long before I could make out Dylan’s voice nearby – he was under the house, close to the edge of the cliff.

I jumped over the railing and landed on the ground almost silently. I saw Dylan first, and then, with a flood of relief, Fang. They were standing tensely by a concrete piling. I could tell this wasn’t, like, guys’ night out.

“This is bigger than you and what you want.” Dylan sounded ice cold. It was actually the first time I’d heard his voice like that, and it was unnerving somehow. “I’m telling you, the danger I saw today was real.”

Fang’s voice was just as cold as Dylan’s. “Why should I believe you? We don’t know anything about you.”

“I get that, Fang. What matters is that I know a lot about her,” Dylan said. “Probably even more than you do.”

Fang’s face showed dark fury. I might have witnessed the first bird kid boy fight in history if I hadn’t bolted forward, my feet crunching on the gravel. “Fang!”

They swiveled and saw me. Dylan looked taken aback, and Fang’s expression was angry and shut.

“The house was on fire,” I greeted them tersely. “In case you’re interested.”

They both glanced up overhead as if to make sure the house was still standing. Fang sniffed, smelling the smoke, and I saw comprehension cross his face.

“It’s out, right?” he said. I just looked at him.

“Is everyone okay?” Dylan asked stiffly.

“I’m sure you had some super important and crucial reason for being out here,” I said, my words like icy spikes, “when the living room was going up in flames over your heads.”

“Everything seems under control, Max.” Fang shoved his hands into his pockets as he redirected his eyes toward me.

“We were talking about you,” Dylan – who hadn’t yet learned that honesty isn’t always the best policy – blurted out.

Fang’s gaze sent daggers at him.

I was now ready to crack these two numbskulls’ heads together. “Dylan, Flock Rule Number One: The safety of the kids is always most important. Period.”

“I understand,” Dylan insisted. “But Max, I have to tell you that -”

“And Flock Rule Number Two is, Don’t argue with Max or you’ll live to regret it.” I spun and stomped out to the clearing, turning back for one last jab at Dylan. “And by the way, you clearly don’t know me better than Fang does. Do you see Fang arguing with me? No, you do not.”

Fang rolled his eyes. I jumped up and landed back on the deck.

Advanced life-forms, my sweet patootie. Jerks. Both of them.

39

IT TOOK THE FLOCK about two seconds to correctly read the insane glint of rage in my eye, and they all scuttled out for cleaning supplies while I sloshed around the living room, cataloging damage.

“Max.”

I swung my head to see Jeb standing against a wall. Soot was smeared on his face, and his eyes were bloodshot. “Good job taking off like that,” Jeb said tersely. “You can’t just leave them on their own. And you can’t just run away from problems every time you get upset.”

“Go jump!” I yelled at him. “How dare you judge me! You’re the one who left us all on our own, when we were much younger than this! You butthead!”

“Let bygones be bygones, Max. I know we’ve had our differences, but we should put them behind us – for the good of the flock.” He gestured to the disaster before us. “This clearly isn’t working. You need help. I think I should come back and live here. I should take up where I left off.”

“Forget it!” I told him in my best voice of authority. “There is no freaking way you will ever live in this house like one of us. I wouldn’t trust you if you were the last life raft leaving the Titanic!”

“You haven’t done much better,” Jeb said. “Look at this place! Not to mention how the other kids are feeling so alienated by you and Fang now that you seem to have become your own cozy flock of two.”

My face went red. No snappy comeback for that one.

“We never intended for that to happen,” Jeb said – like “they” had made a whole flowchart of our lives before we were even born. That was the last straw.

“Guess what? You don’t get to intend squat to happen in my life, ever again!” I shouted. “You don’t get to pick out what freaking socks I wear, much less anything else!”

Jeb glared at me. “You’re not making good decisions, Max,” he said with quiet intensity. “You’re being run by your heart, not your head. That isn’t how I brought you up.”

I thought my chest was going to explode. “You brought me up in a dog crate,” I said, trying not to shriek. “Those days are over. Forever.”

40

I HAD NIGHTMARES THAT NIGHT. I dreamed that I slapped Angel, hard, and her head split open – then her face peeled aside to reveal Mr. Chu, my old nemesis. I dreamed that Fang and I were dressed up and walking down an aisle in a church, but when I turned to look at him, he had the head of an Eraser. I dreamed that Ivory boy Dylan had disgusting boils on his face. Eew. I guess my subconscious was trying to make an oh, so subtle point: People aren’t always what they seem.

It was late morning when I finally woke, feeling almost as if I’d been drugged. The amount of sun coming in the window told me it was almost lunchtime. I padded down the hall, the smell of smoke and charred couch becoming stronger. When I reached the living room, I stopped in surprise.

It was almost empty. All the ruined furniture was gone. The water had been mopped up. Nudge was on a step stool, spraying the sooty ceiling with cleaner. Without a word, I went into the kitchen for some chow.

Gazzy and Iggy followed me in, carrying dirty dishes and a pile of dirty clothes. Iggy dropped the clothes by the washing machine. When did these guys get so industrious?

“What’s all that?” I asked.

“I told them to clean up their pigsty,” Angel said. “Gaz, put those dishes in the sink. Iggy, start a load of laundry. Some of your clothes have mold on them.”

Was I still having a nightmare? Since when did Angel give orders?

I opened the fridge, but it was empty. I looked around and saw a couple empty cereal boxes, an empty bread wrapper.

“Are we all out of food?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Angel, tapping a piece of paper with a pencil. “I’ve been making a list. Jeb said he’d stop at a store on the way back from the dump.”

“Bless his heart,” I said sourly. “But I’ve always provided the food for this flock. You’re all acting like I’m not even here or something.” I felt the first prickles of tears starting in the backs of my eyes.

Go figure: I didn’t cry when I had my ribs broken, but the flock taking care of themselves made me weepy. Angel stared at me.

“Give me the list,” I said, trying not to rip it out of her hands. “I’ll deal with it. It’ll be faster, anyway.” Angel pushed the paper over to me. I poured a cup of coffee and sauntered out to the deck.

My chest constricted when I saw Jeb down below. He had a pickup truck with an open-bed trailer hitched to it. Fang was on the trailer, tying down all the ruined, sodden furniture.

Dylan was on the ground, shaking water off books and tossing them into the truck bed. He and Fang were careful not to look at each other.

“Get that lamp, Dylan,” Jeb commanded, checking the hitch of the trailer. Dylan nodded and placed a lamp on top of an armchair. “The dump said they’d take anything.” “Oh, really?” I called down to him. “Do they take reject mutants and scientists too?” It was mean, but Jeb and Dylan didn’t seem to be getting it.

They were not our family.

I grabbed my jacket inside and jumped out the front door, over the canyon.

41

GAZZY WAS HOLDING HIS BREATH, cheeks puffed out, belly pushed out, arms at his sides.

“Puffer fish!” Angel guessed. Gazzy shook his head.

“Blister!” said Iggy, poking Gazzy’s cheeks. Gazzy shook his head.

“Knish?” suggested Total. Gazzy shook his head.

“We give up!” Nudge said. “What are you?”

Gazzy let his breath out in a rush. “A grain of rice, cooking!” he said. “Obviously! I started off all skinny, then got bigger and bigger!”

Dylan laughed. “Good one,” he said. “Never would have guessed -”

A high-pitched whistling noise interrupted him and filled the room. Just as everyone was registering the smoking ball on the floor, it exploded.

The explosion was small – a flash of blinding light, followed by a sickening stream of pink smoke. Everyone began coughing, practically retching from the noxious smell.

Then, in the next second, there was a huge crunching noise – from above.

“Scatter!” said Gazzy.

They all fanned out around the edges of the room. Angel motioned to Dylan to keep his back against the wall.

“Oh, God, what is that stuff?” Nudge moaned, coughing into her sleeve.

The shock of the gas cloud rendered them useless as the roof above them was ripped apart with loud splintering noises. Then an inhumanly large, hairy hand grabbed some Sheetrock from the ceiling and tore it away with long, ragged yellow claws.

“Oh, my God,” Nudge breathed. “Is that an Eraser?”

“Everyone, outside!” Angel ordered. It was always better to fight in the air than inside a building, and the smoke felt crippling. But as the flock raced for doors and windows, those doors and windows crashed inward, followed by the hulking, horribly familiar forms of Erasers.

It was like waking up into a nightmare of the past.

“Dinnertime!” one of the Erasers growled, and the others laughed – the same way the flock had heard so many times before. Their wolfish faces were split into ugly yellow-toothed grins, and their small mean eyes glittered with the excitement of the hunt. There were at least ten of them, and they easily weighed more than two hundred pounds each.

The dogs bravely leaped at the wolfmen first. Akila managed to clamp her jaws around one’s ankle and draw blood before he kicked her away. Total took to the air, flitting around like a big black mutant moth, snarling and snapping, occasionally getting a bite of Eraser flesh.

It was a good distraction. The kids had a second to catch their breath as the smoke began to dissipate. Then instinct kicked in, and in moments they had launched themselves at their attackers.

“They still smell like garbage!” Gazzy yelled, as the first blows were exchanged. He felt like he might barf.

“Okay, now I’m mad!” Iggy shouted.

Angel glanced over to see a thin trickle of blood coming from his nose.

An Eraser lunged at Angel, and she dodged, screaming bloody murder. She grabbed a floor lamp and connected with the Eraser’s heavily boned head, snapping it to one side.

Nearby, Dylan was coughing and gagging from the lingering smoke. And yet he was mercilessly pounding an Eraser, his fists flying almost supernaturally fast. The Eraser was doubled over, unsuccessfully trying to block the blows.

So, the new bird kid had been programmed to fight.

The rest of them were even better trained to fight Erasers, but with the desperate impulse to keep their arms in front of their noses and mouths, they started to lose ground.

One Eraser grabbed Nudge and held her in a death grip even though she screamed and kicked with all her might. A second jumped behind her and grasped her wings brutally.

He was getting ready to break them.

42

THE SUN BEAT DOWN on my shoulders. It felt heavenly to be out flying, my hair streaming back, silence all around. I gazed down at the earth beneath me, the winding streams carved through red canyons, the striated layers of rock revealed by millennia of erosion, my tiny shadow on the ground, barely visible -

And the dark shadow following me, so close, practically right on top of me.

I took a breath, folded my wings down, swung my feet so I was vertical, and snapped my fist up hard. With unerring timing, it connected solidly with a face.

I heard a surprised hiss of breath, felt skin split beneath the force, then dove down, did a somersault in midair, and angled myself to attack from below.

“What the hell is the matter with you!” Fang shouted. One hand was pressed to his face, below his right eye.

“Fang!” I evened myself out till I was flying close to him. Our wings kept us about eight feet apart. “I’m sorry – I didn’t know it was you. Why were you sneaking up on me?”

“Who else would it be?” He sounded cranky and kept rubbing his face.

“Anyone! An Eraser, or a Flyboy, or -”

“There aren’t any more Erasers,” he said, giving me a confused look. “And I don’t think there are any more Flyboys either. We haven’t seen any in ages. Who else is going to be flying after you except one of us?”

We both thought of Dylan at the same time. “Sorry,” I muttered again. “I just reacted.”

His cheek was pink and already swelling – he would have a helluva shiner by tomorrow. “Look, there’s a tree over there. Can we stop a minute?”

A huge pine stood at the edge of the tree line on the mountain. We swooped down, slowed, and landed on a large branch.

“Sorry about yesterday,” Fang said. He leaned his back against the broad, rough trunk. “I let Dylan get to me. It was stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t notice the house almost burning down.” He gave a brief, wry smile.

“It didn’t almost burn down,” I said. “Just the couch, really. Gazzy and Ig were making a new stash of detonators, and ‘something happened.’”

Fang shook his head and let out a breath, then looked deeply into my eyes. I got that hollow, fluttery feeling again. I wanted to melt into him and forget everything, but something still felt like it had changed.

For some reason, Dylan’s face popped into my mind, and it was as though the two of them were side by side: Fang and Dylan. They were night and day. Dylan’s face was more open, wanting to talk, to ask questions, to learn. Fang’s face was closed, secretive, strong, like the most interesting riddle I would ever find.

“Jeb said the others were complaining about us,” I told him. The fresh pine-scented breeze blew my hair around, and I tucked it behind my ear.

“We’re all getting used to the… changed dynamics,” said Fang. He reached out and took a strand of my hair, immediately getting caught in a tangle. “It’s pretty, in the sun,” he said, holding the strand out to catch the sun’s rays. It was mostly brown but had streaks of dark red and even a little blond.

“Still,” I pressed on, “we have to think -”

“No, we don’t,” Fang whispered, and he tilted his head. I barely had time to breathe in before his warm lips were on mine, for the first time in… days. He put his arms around me and angled his head more.

I was so familiar with him that I could feel how swollen his cheek was, right under his eye. I mean, I knew Fang. I’d always known him. Literally always, my whole life. He’d always been my best friend and my second-in-command. I didn’t really know when our feelings had changed. All I knew was that he was the best thing I had in my life.

He held me closer and closer until we were practically glued together. I don’t know how long we stayed there, kissing and murmuring to each other. Finally my stomach rumbled, making us both laugh and break apart, our foreheads still touching.

“I guess I better get to the store,” I said, feeling like everything would be all right again in my world. “You coming?”

Fang nodded, and then a low buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, distracted me. We both looked up through the top of the tree. Very, very high, higher than helicopters usually go, were four black choppers. We could barely see them, barely hear them. Most humans wouldn’t have been able to spot them, wouldn’t have known they were there.

But they were. And they were headed in the direction of our house.

Without speaking, we let go of the tree and fell outward, then opened our wings as the ground rushed up to meet us.

Time for reality again.

43

DYLAN HADN’T BEEN ALIVE much longer than eight months and didn’t know much about flock taboos, but one thing he instinctively knew: Don’t mess with a bird kid’s wings.

And Nudge’s were about to be snapped. Then they’d throw her out the window.

“Don’t you dare!” Dylan cried as he leaped for Nudge. Snarling, an Eraser shot out a boot-clad foot, caught Dylan squarely in the chest, and sent him flying across the room. He slammed into a wall and hit his head hard.

In the midst of the battle, Gazzy raced to the kitchen. One of Iggy’s big carving knives, maybe…? A fast glance revealed nothing – the kitchen was cluttered with dirty plates and pots.

He spied a possible weapon, grabbed it, and raced back to the stench-filled living room, where Nudge was still struggling. An Eraser clamped a hairy paw over her mouth, its rough claws scraping her cheek. Gazzy punched a button on his weapon and jabbed it hard into the back of one of Nudge’s captors.

“Attack of the Kitchen Appliances!” Gazzy yelped hoarsely, never a great one for stealth.

The mixer blades quickly began to spin, and just as quickly got horribly tangled in the Eraser’s long, greasy fur. Gazzy pushed the speed button to “high,” and fur actually started to rip out.

The Eraser howled and whirled to kick at Gazzy. The moment he dropped his guard, Nudge twisted away from him hard, and freed one arm. Then she pulled back and gave the other Eraser a huge snap kick right to his stomach.

When he loosened his grip on her, Nudge instantly dropped to the floor and grabbed his ankles, yanking them as hard as she could. In the next moment Akila lunged at him, barking and snarling, and the Eraser couldn’t regain his balance. He went tumbling out the window, down, down, down into the canyon below.

Gazzy pushed the mixer into the other Eraser again, ripping out more chunks of fur and skin. The Eraser shrieked in pain, trying to bat the mixer away, but it was hopelessly entangled in his fur.

Iggy’s keen sense of smell had been the most assaulted by the gas bomb and Eraser stench. But the upside was he could easily gauge each Eraser’s position. Just as the wounded creature roared at Gazzy, Iggy flung something that glinted in the light as it spun through the air: the blade from his food processor. It sliced through the fur and embedded itself in the Eraser’s back.

“Same bat time,” said Gazzy, grabbing the Eraser’s feet.

“Same bat canyon!” Nudge coughed, helping Gazzy heave the struggling half-man out the window.

That shifted the balance. The flock, Akila, Total, and Dylan could now gang up on the remaining Erasers, two or three on one, and over the next few minutes managed to shove, kick, tip, and otherwise eject every single one of them out the canyon-side windows.

Then it was eerily silent, except for a few wheezes and coughs.

Angel jumped off the deck and flew upward, to see if there were other threats.

“Turn on all the fans!” gasped Dylan, then he leaned over and retched. He’d been breathlessly taking out Erasers since the moment they hit the floor.

Angel came back in, rubbing big dark bruises on her upper arms. “I don’t see anything else,” she said. “Everyone report.” She walked around the room, estimating the damage the way she’d seen Max do.

“Um, this place is shot to hell,” said Gazzy.

“Bloody nose,” said Iggy. “With red blood.”

Now that he’d been able to clear his lungs, Dylan was examining big gouges in his arm. “I’ll be okay, pretty much,” he said bravely. “But I’m worried about Nudge.”

She was crouched on the floor, twisting awkwardly to look over her shoulder. “I’m not sure, but one of my wings doesn’t feel right. Can you sprain a wing?”

“I jammed my pinkie finger,” Angel said, frowning. She gritted her teeth, gripped the end of it, and fearlessly yanked it back into alignment.

Akila was panting, and she and Total touched noses. “We’re okay,” said Total. “But I will never get the taste of Eraser out of my mouth.”

Angel held up a hand. “Shh! Incoming!”

Everyone braced as they heard noises outside.

Then Max and Fang landed on the deck, hopping and skipping to avoid all the debris and broken glass. Wideeyed, Max rushed through the shattered sliding door with Fang close behind her.

“Nice of you to join us,” Angel said.

“Gazzy, man, jeezum!” Fang exclaimed. “What the heck have you been eating, for God’s sake?”

“That was a smoke bomb!” Gazzy defended himself. “Not even I could fill this whole flippin’ house!”

44

“WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?” I asked, taking in Iggy’s bloody nose, Nudge’s pained face.

“Erasers,” said Iggy angrily. “Erasers happened. But enough about us. How was your joyride?”

“I heard the choppers,” I said. “I came back as fast as I could.” I was still trying to process the “Erasers” part.

“Whatever, Max.” Iggy shook his head angrily. “You and Fang were off together – like always. The rest of us could have died here, but as long as you two get your face time, it doesn’t matter!”

“Hey!” came Jeb’s voice from outside. “Put down the ladder!” He was just returning from the dump. In a few moments, he was staring at us all in shock. Then he looked with dismay around the living room, which was now a poster child for the benefits of having home insurance. Which, of course, we didn’t.

“Erasers attacked,” I told him. “Apparently. While I was at the store.”

Jeb frowned. “Are you sure they were actual Erasers? Not robots?”

“These were definitely Erasers,” Gazzy said. “You can still smell them.”

“Look what I found outside.” Jeb held up a black duffel bag. “Maybe this’ll offer some kind of clue.” He opened it, and we all fell silent. Inside were black hoods. Clear vials of liquid. Hypos in cases. There were black plastic body bags.

“Those were for us,” said Gazzy, as we gaped at the bag’s contents. “They must have been trying to knock us out with that nerve gas stuff.”

“Erasers don’t use this kind of equipment. Only brute force,” Jeb remarked. “Someone else must have been out there too.”

“But weren’t all the Erasers wiped out?” I asked Jeb. Of anyone, Jeb would be in the know about the wolf boys.

Jeb nodded slowly. “The entire original production lines, as well as the next four generations, were all… retired,” he said. “But I wonder. After the School closed, the scientists, what was left of them, scattered. It’s possible – even likely – that one or more of them have set up shop somewhere else.”

“Where are the Erasers now? Do you know?” Fang asked the kids.

“Dumped ’em in the canyon,” Angel said, rubbing her hand.

“Good job, guys,” I said. “That was the way to go.” I tried a grin. “But I bet we’ll be smelling them for days, until the vultures finish them off.”

Fang strode back out to the deck, hopped up on the railing, and jumped off to investigate the remains. I saw envy and admiration war on Dylan’s face.

“So, Dylan, your first Eraser fight,” I commented, wondering how he had done.

“He did great,” said Total. “He’s a machine. Dylan’s like the top-of-the-line Cuisinart to Gazzy’s hand mixer.” Total was a bit of a gourmet, and his point was all but lost on me.

Dylan shrugged as if he’d done nothing at all, even though one arm had ugly gashes on it. His long-sleeved plaid shirt was in tatters.

“Um, we should probably be treating those wounds,” I said, sounding a little more concerned than I wanted to. That mother hen thing is a hard habit to break.

“Don’t worry, Max. I’ll be fine,” he said, taking his shirt off so he could check out the damage. I tried to avert my eyes from his muscular torso. But even more distracting was seeing just how shredded his arm really was under that shirt.

“Jeepers!” I couldn’t understand how Dylan could be so unflinching with that kind of damage. “Jeb, make yourself useful for once! You’ve got a medical background, don’t you?”

“I think I can fix it, Max,” Dylan said, as he pulled together ragged bits of skin and held them firmly in place.

The flock heals faster than normal humans, but what Dylan did next I’d never seen another bird kid even attempt: He raised his wounded arm to his mouth and used his own spit to wet the damaged areas. WTH?

“Eew!” Nudge said, and turned away. I, however, was fascinated. And terrified.

“Just a little trick Dr. Gunther-Hagen taught me,” Dylan said, as we watched his skin scab up and heal right before our very eyes.

45

I DIDN’T HAVE TIME to grill Dylan about just how much he’d been subjected to Dr. G.’s experimentation before Fang landed lightly on the deck and came in.

“There’s nothing down there,” he reported.

“What?” Nudge sounded stunned.

“Some blood. Bits of fur. Iggy’s mixer,” Fang clarified. “No bodies.”

“Whoever sent them picked them up,” Total said. “Like trash.”

“About my mixer,” Iggy began.

“It was all I could find!” Gazzy said. “You mixed someone to death?” I asked.

“I adapted to the circumstances,” Gazzy said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Hmm,” I said, starting to pace. “So – the Erasers are back. And someone came to get them. We didn’t hear or see how they got here. Choppers may or may not be related.” I rubbed my chin as I walked, trying to put this together.

“It’s nice of you to care now,” Iggy said, stopping me in my tracks.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I put my hands on my hips.

“I’ll go ahead and name the elephant in the room,” Iggy went on, glaring over my shoulder. “You and Fang weren’t here when we needed you. You were out there” – he gestured to a wall – “because, let’s face it, you guys care about each other now more than you care about the rest of us.”

“What? That’s crazy! It was just chance. It could have been me and Nudge, or Fang and you. us not being here didn’t make this happen!”

“Unless someone was watching and saw our two best fighters leave,” Angel said.

It was a horrible thought, and it hit me right in the gut. My brain whirred.

“Look, I guess it’s natural,” said Iggy. “You’re teenagers, it’s springtime, everyone’s thoughts are turning to birds and bees and caterpillars and moths…”

“Caterpillars?” Nudge’s nose wrinkled.

“No one’s thinking about moths,” Fang said. I heard anger in his voice.

“It’s true,” Angel said. “You guys care more about each other than you do about any of us. And we’ve just seen how dangerous that is – for us.”

I was so horrified I couldn’t think of a snappy comeback.

“It’s time, Max,” Angel went on firmly. “You know it is.” She looked at the rest of the flock. “You guys know it too. It’s time for Max and Fang to move on.”

46

“MOVE ON?” I tried to ignore the squeak in my voice. “Have you been breathing next to Gazzy too long? What the heck are you talking about?”

“We used to be one flock,” Angel said, steely-eyed. “Now it’s like we’re a flock of four and a sub-flock of two. So maybe you guys should go be your own flock, by yourselves.”

“Listen, missy,” I began, letting danger drip from my words. “I’m still here, day in, day out, doing for this flock. So don’t be telling me -”

“I don’t have to tell you or anyone else anything!” Angel exploded. “We have eyes! We see how it is! All you think about is how to get away with Fang for a while! So I think it’s time you really got away!”

“I planned the whole birthday party!” I said. “For all of us! I helped create this house! For all of us!”

I shot looks at the rest of the angry – and in a few cases alarmed – flock. Dylan was frowning slightly, his face guarded. I wondered if he’d had anything to do with this.

“Angel?” said Jeb. “Be careful. I agree there might be need for a change. But maybe if I come back, we can all work toge -”

“Max.” Angel interrupted Jeb as if he didn’t exist. Her voice was quiet and calm. “I love you. I don’t wish you harm. But like you’ve said yourself, we’re only as strong as the weakest one of us. Right now, you’re making the flock weaker because your head and your heart aren’t with us. It’s time for you to move on. It’s time for me to be the leader.”

“You?” Jeb looked confused. I guessed he’d missed the first eighteen times Angel had tried to take over the flock.

“Oh, not this again!” I burst out, waving my arms. “Just once I’d like to be able to turn around without you stabbing me in the back!”

Angel’s face paled, but she stood firm. “Max, this has been coming for some time. You’re trying to have it all, and you just can’t. Look – it’s time for a vote. Max goes. Everyone who agrees, raise your hand.”

I blustered some more, but my heart sank as Iggy slowly raised his hand. His nose had stopped bleeding, but dark bruises were forming around his eyes.

Nudge, my Nudge, was next. Her cheeks were scraped, her shirt collar flecked with blood. She looked near tears, like she was making an impossible choice – but still choosing not me.

Gazzy raised his hand, not looking at me. His knuckles were swollen and scratched. And of course Angel had her hand up.

“Fang?” I turned to him. He wasn’t looking at me. He was glowering at Dylan, who was ever-so-subtly shaking his head. Like they were having some private guy talk.

“Fang! Tell them they’re overreacting.”

“Everyone is overreacting,” Fang said very slowly. “Even you.”

For a moment, I was speechless. Was Fang turning his back on me? Did Dylan have mind control powers like Angel? Was he doing a number on Fang?

Anything seemed possible.

“You’re my family,” I began, then stopped quickly as my voice threatened to break. I cleared my throat and tried again. “After the last time the flock split up, I swore I would do anything to keep us together, no matter what, for always. But it kind of takes all of us wanting to stay together.” I let out my breath slowly, to keep from crying. I shook my head. “I think you guys are making a mistake.”

The room was completely still and silent.

“But I can’t make you want me to stay.” I blinked a couple times, as if I would suddenly wake from an awful dream into a better reality – like, some stranger coming at me with an ice pick, ready to gouge my eyes out.

“So you’re sure? You want me to go?”

Nudge’s lip was quivering; none of them seemed happy, but they didn’t seem to be changing their minds either.

I couldn’t look at Fang. If he’d been holding up his hand, I would have wanted to just drop into the canyon like a stone, wings tucked in tight.

I nodded and swallowed. “Okay, then. Later.”

I turned and sprinted out through the smashed deck doors, bounced once off the deck railing, and launched myself into the sky, which seemed a million times bigger and wilder than it ever had.